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"Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza." This was leading human rights organization Amnesty International's characterization of Israel's massive and ongoing bombing campaign in Gaza, which, two weeks in, has killed more than 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,300 children.
Israel is killing Palestinian children at a rate of over 100 per day, which is 100 times greater than the rate at which Russia's bombing of Ukraine had killed Ukrainian children. Over 300 Palestinian children were killed on Tuesday alone, as Israeli leaders promise further violence is incoming. This is all a "response" to a shocking Hamas attack on October 7, in which over 1,400 Israelis were killed and some 200 people taken hostage. Yet how can anyone with a functioning moral compass defend Israel's response?
Media coverage of the horrors unfolding in Palestine and Israel this month has ignored two critical keys to understanding what we're actually seeing on our screens: context and chronology. For many, the clock started ticking on October 7 with the Hamas attack, which indefensibly included a murderous assault on Israeli civilians. They act as if everything was fine on October 6.
Things weren't fine on October 6. This year alone, Israel already killed dozens of Palestinian children in the West Bank. But there were no stories about those victims on our screens. Palestinians in the West Bank not only live under an Israeli military occupation that the U.N. now deems illegal, but also under the "crime against humanity" of apartheid, according to leading human rights organizations.
Also prior to this Hamas attack, Palestinians in Gaza had been living under a 17-year Israeli blockade that has made life unbearable, cutting people off from the outside world, reducing their economy to rubble, and producing endless misery for the people of Gaza in what human rights organizations have called an "open-air prison," where the inmates' crime is simply being Palestinian and living in Gaza.
Prior to this Hamas attack, successive Israeli military assaults on Gaza had killed thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children. And when unarmed protesters marched to Israel's fence in 2018 to end the unlawful siege that was suffocating them, Israeli snipers opened fire, killing scores of activists, medics, and journalists.
Palestinians and their supporters are constantly asked to affirm Israel's right to self-defense. But do Palestinians have a right to self-defense? What is the appropriate Palestinian response to years of siege and occupation and war crimes?
When Israel is attacked, Western leaders believe it has the right to obliterate Palestinian cities. Have any Western leaders supported the right of Palestinian militants to respond to the siege on Gaza and thousands killed by obliterating Israeli cities and rooting out the Israeli military?
No one believes that Hamas's indiscriminate attack on Israeli military and civilian targets on October 7 was a legitimate response to what Israel has done. So why is Israel's bombing of Gazans not only not condemned, but actively supported?
The rejection of attacks on civilians appears to only apply in one direction: In the face of murderous violence directed at Israelis, we now see U.S. politicians and Western leaders offer unconditional backing to war crimes by the Israeli government against the people of Gaza.
Some may object to the characterization of Israel's bombing campaign as a war crime, clinging to the fantasy of an Israeli army that does its best to avoid civilian casualties. They are wrong. Israeli leaders kicked off this campaign by cutting off water, food, and electricity to all of Gaza's 2.2 million residents or "human animals" as Israel's defense minister called them, in a transparent act of collective punishment. As Human Rights Watch put it, "the Israeli government is deliberately deepening the suffering of civilians in Gaza."
Israeli leaders have said the emphasis of their bombing campaign "is on damage and not on accuracy" and have reduced entire city blocks to rubble. Amnesty International's in-depth investigation concluded that "Israeli attacks violated international humanitarian law, including by failing to take feasible precautions to spare civilians, or by carrying out indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, or by carrying out attacks that may have been directed against civilian objects." The damage is self-evident, in footage of thousands of dead or dying Palestinian children littering social media. These are textbook war crimes.
Yet here we are, with the U.S. president and politicians across the spectrum supporting Israeli war crimes against Palestinian civilians in the name of "self-defense."
It's sheer hypocrisy to defend Ukrainian sovereignty against Russian occupation while enabling Israel's illegal occupation and war crimes over Palestinians. We're operating under the delusion that Hamas can be defeated militarily, as if the fundamental injustice of Israeli oppression, siege, and occupation won't produce the next generation of militants bent on murderous vengeance as they watch Israeli violence destroy their families.
Or maybe sanity can prevail in the face of the lunacy we're witnessing out of Washington. Maybe someone will come up with the novel observation that since funding Israel's brutality for the past half century hasn't produced peace, maybe it's time to try something different. Maybe it's time to insist that Palestinians be a free people who can exist with the same dignity and human rights that Israelis enjoy, and maybe, just maybe, we can start working toward peace that is built on equality rather than eternal subordination.
Omar Baddar is a political analyst and the former director of the Arab American Institute.
The views in this article are the writer's own.
